For the last one hundred and fifty years, mobile giant Nokia has operated out of Finland, but now that ex Microsoft business chief Stephen Elop is in charge, everything and anything is on the table for change, and it now looks as if Nokia might be moving to Silicon Valley.

Elop is planning to announce the changes on Friday, according to well-placed sources within the organization. Elop had previously said that a big shake-up would be coming to the beleaguered Finnish company, which — despite selling the vast majority of Q4 2010’s smartphones — has struggled with low profits and irrelevancy in a post-iPhone age.

One reason for this is because Nokia does the vast majority of its business outside of the United States. In the US, Nokia sales are in the toilet, and their market share has shrank from 35 percent in 2002 to just eight percent last year.

In order to more strongly focus on America, Elop is rumored to be doing a lot of things, including considering the adoption of Windows Phone 7 on Nokia handsets and moving the company headquarters to California, where Nokia executives (whom would be expected to move) would be able to more easily hob-nob with other Silicon Valley execs.

In truth, the move has already started, with one of Elop’s first moves in December being the renting of virtual offices in Silicon Valley. As for moving there permanently, the writing has apparently been on the wall for awhile, with Elop having said in a memo to Nokia staff that he believes the company has become too remote from key markets. Packing up and moving out of Finland is one way to handle that, for sure.